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Sunday, October 26, 2014

How Nigerian English May Cause You To Be Mistaken for a 419 Email Scammer

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Have you ever sent an email to someone or some
people in the United States, Canada, Britain or some other English-speaking
Western country and didn’t get a response? Well, it is entirely possible that
your email didn’t even make it to their inbox. If it did, it is also possible
that certain uniquely Nigerian expressions in your email that were popularized
in the West by Nigerian email scam artists triggered a scam alarm and caused
you to be ignored. What are these “419 English” expressions that are like
waving a red flag in front of a bull in the West?

First some context. A few days ago, a Nigerian
Facebook friend of mine, who is also a professor here in the United States, put
up a status update that inspired this column. He wrote: “Was I really wrong?
Was the professor at the other end of the telephone line correct? She read my
email and decided to withdraw her offer of introducing me to people in
environmental education because my written English ‘is suspect.’ So I asked her
to give me an example of something I expressed incorrectly. The first example
was ‘I hope to read from you soon.’ She said the correct expression is ‘I hope
to hear from you soon.’

“I cleared my throat and informed her that it was
not a face-to-face communication and that I thought the word to hear did not fit
into a totally text-based communication. She did not sound impressed and till
date never returned my calls. Should I change my communication style and let
orality creep into my text? Does anyone know the rules about such things?”

As I wrote in my contribution to his update, the
American professor who called his English “suspect” and stopped communicating
with him on the basis of his “suspect” English is most certainly rude and
uncharitable. Unfortunately, however, ending email communication with "I
hope to read from you soon" is not only unconventional among native
English speakers; it's also one of the core phrases associated with 419 emails
from Nigeria, which is frankly unfair because it's part of the lexical and expressive
repertoire of Nigerian English. It's the worst example of what I call the
pathologization of the linguistic singularities of a people.

However, this incident should cause us to reflect on
the place of Nigerian English in inter-dialectal English communication,
especially because 419 emails have done more to popularize Nigerian English to
the rest of the English-speaking world than anything else.That
means the stylistic imprints of scam emails from Nigeria vicariously criminalize
many innocent Nigerians, as the Nigerian professor’s case and similar other
unreported cases have shown.

Concerns about authorship attribution of fraudulent
e-mail communications emerged fairly early in studies of Internet fraud.
Computational linguists and information systems specialists have deployed
strategies to perform software forensics with intent to identify the authors of
fraudulent e-mails.Oliver de Vel and
his colleagues, for instance, employed a Support Vector Machine learning
algorithm for mining e-mail content based on its structural characteristics and
linguistic patterns in order to provide authorship evidence of scam e-mails for
use within a legal context.

I know this because about 10 years ago I did
research on the rhetorical strategies and stylistic imprints of 419 emails. In
the course of my research I came across several forensic linguistic programs
that developed email authorship identification markers based solely on phrases
and expressions that are unique to 419 email scams. The software developed from
these programs helps people automatically trash “419-sounding” emails.

The
problem, as you can expect, is that the software also deletes many legitimate
emails from honest Nigerians since the alarm triggers for the software are
uniquely Nigerian English expressions. "Hope to read from you soon"
features prominently in the repertoire of "red-flag" expressions the
software uses to identify 419 emails. (For evidence, search "I hope to read from you soon" on Google and see what comes up).

When my friend quoted his American acquaintance as
saying that his English was "suspect" based on certain expressions,
such as "I hope to read from you soon," I knew immediately that the
American was hinting that some of his expressions raised Nigerian 419 email
authorship identification red flags. The professor is probably familiar with
419 email authorship identification programs and the phrases that trigger them.

One won’t be entirely wrong to call the whole host of 419
email authorship identification programs as engaging in borderline linguistic
racism because they basically pathologize and criminalize the stylistic
idiosyncrasies of an entire non-native English variety. All of us who were born
and educated in Nigeria can't escape Nigerian English inflections in our
quotidian communicative encounters every once in a while.

The 419 scam artists write the way they do because
they are the products of the Nigerian linguistic environment. It's like
isolating American English expressions that appear regularly in the emails of
American scammers and developing an authorship identification program based on
these expressions so that any email from any American, including even the
American president, that uses any stereotyped American English expression is
automatically "suspect."

Well, instead of dwelling in self-pitying
lamentation, I’ve decided to highlight some of the stock Nigerian English expressions
that email authorship identification programs use to identify Nigerian 419
email scammers—and unfairly criminalize many honest Nigerians.

1.
“Reply me as soon as possible.” You can’t get a
typical Nigerian to say or write “reply TO me” even if his life depended on it.
That’s why Nigerian newspaper headlines are often filled with expressions like
“Jonathan replies Obasanjo,” “Buhari replies Gumi,” etc. instead of “Jonathan
replies to Obasanjo,” “Buhari replies to Gumi,” etc.If the
intended audience of one’s communication is exclusively Nigerian “reply me”
will be perfectly OK, but it helps to know that the verb “reply” always
co-occurs with “to” in the standard varieties of English spoken in Britain, the
United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. So if you end your email
with “I hope you will reply me as soon as possible,” be sure that someone
somewhere in the West who has had enough pesky 419 email solicitations will
automatically assume that you’re a 419 conman.

3.
Bookish English.One of the enduring stylistic idiosyncrasies
of Nigerian English is the tendency to use big, formal, unusual, and archaic
words in informal contexts. For instance, the word “demurrage” appears in almost
all 419 emails. This is a recondite, archaic English word commonly used in
informal Nigerian English to denote a charge required as compensation for the
delay of a ship or freight car or other cargo beyond its scheduled time of
departure. Professor David Jowittcalls
this character of Nigerian English “bookish English”—the tendency to hold on to
words and expressions that have run out of fashion in, and receded to the
linguistic backyard of, modern native-speaker usage. I called them “weird
words we’re wedded to in Nigerian English” in a January
20, 2010 article. Other regular bookish English words in informal Nigerian
English are“imprest,”“estacode,”and “parastatal.”

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). He also writes two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust).

In April 2014 Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.